engleski

Generational Differences in Relation to Immigration: The Attitudes of Secondary School Pupils and Their Parents towards Immigrants in Croatia

Bearing in mind that Croatia is not but, after joining European union, could become an immigrant country, this paper explores the attitudes towards (possible) immigrants (foreign workers) expressed by two family generations in Croatia, secondary school pupils and their parents. The purpose of generation comparisons is to try to establish intergenerational similarities and differences in these attitudes, to determine their indicators and explain possible reasons for their occurrence. The survey data gathered in 2009 on a convenience sample of secondary school pupils and their parents (N = 1902) are analysed. Within each generation (and also between them) the attitudes towards foreign workers are examined through the analysis of perception of their possible entrance to the (local) labour market and their potential influence upon the culture and the values of Croatian society, and the social distancing towards them. Although Croatia is not an immigration country, both, parents and their secondary school children on average expressed stronger need for adaptation of immigrant workers to the national values in order to be accepted in Croatian labour market, while parents more strongly perceive migrant workers as a burden for already oversupplied labour market giving leverage to native workers over the migrant ones than do their children. Factor analysis yielded two dimensions of perception of immigrants in Croatia: as sociocultural and socioeconomic threat. Even though positive correlations in the expression of attitudes and social distance between secondary school pupils and their parents are obtained, t-test (paired samples method) resulted in some intergenerational differences. Parents to a higher extent perceive immigrant workers as socioeconomic threat and express greater social distance towards them than do their children. Regression analyses conducted on each sub- sample tested the effect of two models, analysing firstly the effects of respondents’ sociodemographic, socioeconomic and sociocultural characteristics on two obtained dimensions of perception of immigrants and social distance towards foreign workers followed by introducing political orientations, values and level of religiosity of respondents in the second step into the regression. Results indicate that the effect of first model is stronger in prediction of perception of sociocultural than socioeconomic threat, and second model also contributes more to explanation of perception of sociocultural threat (up to 24% explained variance in parents-sample and 20% explained variance in pupils-sample). Intergenerational differences are visible through significant effect of gender in pupils-sample and significant effect of parental educational level and monthly household income in parents-sample. Political orientations and values are relatively evenly significant in both tested dimensions of immigrant threats in both subsamples while the level of religiosity is significant only in prediction of sociocultural threat among parents. The obtained results are further interpreted within given specific contextual framework of every analysed generation taking into account familial transmission of values and orientations through the process of (ethnic) socialisation.

family generations; secondary school pupils; parents; attitudes towards immigrants; social distance; Croatia

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